Kismet
by Inexplicably Kyprioth
Summary: Jack gets himself stuck back in time, so he hangs around waiting to hitchhike back to his present. The wait is made considerably less boring when he meets someone in a cafe. Not an OC, I promise


**A/N/Disclaimer: I love finding things I wrote long ago and never posted! All the fun of posting without the work. Anyway – I don't own Torchwood any more than RTD or Chris Chibnall or **_**any**_** of them owns me. Since that's illegal, we can assume I don't own Torchwood, or Doctor Who for that matter.**

It was raining again.

"What I want to know," Owen asked, squinting under his raincoat, "is why it always has to be raining."

"Because it's Wales," Gwen snapped, irritable after being dragged out of her warm, dry bed to listen to cold, wet rain and Owen whining. "In Wales, it rains frequently. Since we work outdoors, in Wales, we get rained on."

"I know that, but – "

"What _I _want to know," Tosh interrupted, not sure she could take yet _another _argument along with the cold and the wet and the mud and everything else Torchwood seemed to be piling on them just now, "is why this thing keeps emitting Rift energy."

"I thought you said that was normal," Jack said, taking a brief break from digging. Normally the Rift left things above ground level. Not this time. He had thought that was the only odd thing about this dump – Tosh had said that was the only odd thing about this dump. He went back to digging.

"It was," Tosh said. "Then. Things that come from the Rift always have a bit of residual Rift energy – like meteors have heat energy after passing through the atmosphere. Meteors cool down and so do Rift devices, only Rift devices do so even faster. But this one still reeks of it." She showed the screen she was watching to Owen, who was closest. "As much as if it had come out of the Rift only milliseconds ago. Microseconds ago."

"Huh," Owen said. "Those are big waves." Gwen and Ianto came closer to see.

"Why do you think that is?" Ianto asked, watching the steady rhythm, which formed a silent syncopation to the beat of the rain.

"Well – if it had more heat to start with, it would have only just cooled down this far. But as you see, it's just steady, rather than cooling off completely in about a second, as in the case of Weevils or normal space junk. So my guess is it's more saturated with energy, so some of it is only just now dispersing." Tosh took another look at the screen. "Really saturated."

"Like it was in the Rift for longer than usual? The Rift kept hold of it?" Gwen asked incredulously.

"Maybe it came farther than usual," Owen suggested. "Maybe that takes longer."

"Maybe it's just been Rifted more than once," Gwen corrected him.

"Or maybe," Jack said from in the hole, "it stores Rift energy inside it."

The team turned in unison to stare at him, silently begging for more.

"Think about it. The Rift carries things through time and space randomly, yeah? So maybe someone with more technology – say, from the future – found a way to use Rift energy, hooking it up with technology to regulate it and bang! Time machine."

The rest of Torchwood blinked. "You've thought of this before, haven't you?"

"No, it's just – " The ground shuddered slightly. They all looked down.

"Earthquake? In _Wales_?" Gwen asked.

"I don't think so," Tosh said, sounding distracted, and she turned her device over to look at the back, still uncovered so she could make adjustments to the prototype. "My readings just got bigger."

"_Bigger_? I thought you said it was supposed to cool!" Owen protested. "Bigger is _not _better."

Jack climbed out of the hole, but didn't take the opportunity to look at Tosh's find. "What if more than one civilization figured out how to time travel?" he asked. "What if they were at war?"

Five sets of eyes traded glances. "Fake ship down," Owen muttered. "It's a time bomb."

They ran.

~*~

Tosh was the first to slow, after several painful minutes of sprinting and trying to stay upright when the ground shook every few minutes. "I think it's over," she called to the others, too busy pulling equipment back out of her pocket to notice Owen had slowed even before she spoke. "No more Rift signals."

"But nothing happened," Gwen objected.

"Well it's a _time bomb_," Owen sneered, regaining his composure between huffs. "They don't have to explode you, just shove you to the beginning of the universe."

"Or at least out of the way," Ianto observed, looking around them. "Did it hit us?"

"SUV's still there," Gwen said, pointing.

"And Cardiff city outline," Tosh agreed.

"And the rain," Owen noted. "The same stupid rain. Never thought I'd be glad to see _that_."

"So we're good," Tosh summarized. Ianto was still looking around.

"Where's Jack?"

Jack grunted a bit and picked himself off the ground. He dusted himself off, shedding mostly mud clods but a few bits of gravel as well, and looked around. He was alone. No SUV. It was sunny. Well – at least Cardiff was there. At least _he _was there – the blast hadn't even killed him.

"Oy!" he shouted to Wales in general, hoping it was intended as an ambush and the Time Lords would come out and apologize and put him back now. "Come send me back!"

He was fairly certain it had been a Time Lord weapon; Daleks didn't go in for relocation. He was equally certain that there would be Time Lords to ambush the Daleks they caught; Time Lords didn't just dislocate their enemies a few years away where they could do different damage, certainly not when the Daleks could time travel as well. And for time travelers, being extinct didn't mean you were prohibited from turning up from time to time.

There was no answer.

"By the terms of the Shadow Proclamation…" he tried, and then, "For the sake of Gallifrey!" There was still no answer. It was up to him to get home.

Jack shrugged and turned his attention to Cardiff. Hopefully his team was still alive. If not – well, they would be.

~*~

By his great good fortune, he had been sent _back _in time instead of forward – to December 2005, no less, which meant that the Sycorax ship was due to show up in London in a few days – and with it, the one Time Lord Jack knew, knew how to get hold of and knew how to get around. It gave him a bit of extra time, too.

He thought about helping the Earth deal with the Sycorax, but they'd done well enough without him, and he wouldn't know where to stop. He had no qualms about messing with time – on top of his own paradox-casual training, he now knew it was all wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey anyway and a little jiggle couldn't hurt – but he knew how things had happened, and for better or worse he wanted them to stay happened. He wanted a quick lift back to his present. That was all.

So he didn't interfere, no warnings, no preparations. Instead, he dug up the remains of the time bomb, dusted them off, and took them to London. Then he waited.

On the given day, he lurked carefully, near Jackie's house, where the Doctor would show up and return once the crisis was over, but out of the way of both the adventure and his own path, where he'd run to catch the Doctor and only found a fallen Time Lord hand.

He'd expected the new Doctor to be one-handed. Oh – well. So much for that. Jack found a café and got a coffee and waited for the fireworks to begin.

It was a lovely night – a bit cold outside, but pleasant within, and the coffee – Jack made a face. It didn't hold a candle to Ianto's. He tried admiring the night some more, but all he found was a city not his own and a ground that every tradition said out to have been white with snow and wasn't.

Well, it wouldn't have been anyway, this was London, not some idyllic country scene, but Jack took this reflection as a sign he'd better stick to people watching. He was better at that, and turned around.

What immediately caught his eye was that the prettiest girl in the room was also the saddest. She was almost openly crying, which Jack took as a pretty bad sign this close to Christmas, and so it had to be his job to cheer her up. He tried looking at other people, but his mind had been made up for him, or rather by him, so he shrugged mentally and went to sit across a table from her. He could afford to live by whim just now.

"Hey, gorgeous. Why so glum?"

She tried a smile, tried to fake him off. "Not glum, just pensive. And who _are _you?"

"Just another person alone at Christmas," Jack assured her.

"If I wanted picked up, I would have gone to a bar," she informed him curtly. "Excuse me." She stood up, and took her teacup with her. Ouch.

"Hey, sorry!" Jack objected. "I swear, I have no intentions on you whatsoever. My boyfriend would object."

"So would mine." It was less urgent, but she still meant to go.

"Then why isn't he here?" Jack asked. It was an important question, and would explain a very many things about her.

"Broken leg." So it wasn't a break-up or neglect or anything unpleasant. "Yours?"

Jack was equal to that. "I got the wrong plane at the airport." He shrugged. "I'm going home tonight. I just thought you'd like someone to talk to. I know I would."

She could stay, if it was for him, and Jack did lonely pretty well, on top of being honestly homesick for Ianto. He even missed the Weevil that had brought them together. He was trying not to brood, and conversation would really help that goal, so he was glad when she sat back down and he wasn't stuck watching Christmas lights come on, which reminded him of Ianto and Torchwood for no reason he could divine except that his default setting appeared to be homesick loneliness.

"So you flew here from America?" the girl asked.

"Something like that," Jack agreed, and moved on quickly so she'd assume he meant he'd switched planes in some other country. "What happened to your boyfriend?"

She looked a little suspicious, but let the subject change. "He broke his leg at work," she said. "He's sleeping now and they sent me away."

"What work?"

"Special ops. It's secret," she explained. Jack appreciated that she didn't try some vague cover story. Coming right out and saying 'I'm not telling' always seemed to work better than avoiding the subject, in his experience, and he'd have done the same himself if it weren't for the general obliviousness of humans to the presence of aliens at this point in time. "You?"

"Same, actually," Jack said. "Fancy that. Let's not talk about work, shall we? I don't fancy waking up in the morning with an assignment to shoot at you."

"All right." She didn't laugh. She did fiddle with her mug for a moment, maybe wondering, like Jack was feeling, what they _could _talk about now. He left it to her. "So… you have a boyfriend, huh."

"Yup," Jack answered smugly.

"Where were you two headed?"

"Cardiff. He's Welsh. Well – actually we both live in Cardiff, but we'd been off on business." Just outside the city limit, actually.

"You sure that isn't too much information?" she teased.

Jack shrugged. "I figure if it doesn't put anyone in danger, why keep it a secret? There's no one to call me on it anyway." He paused. "No one I would listen to." Except the Doctor, he added mentally, but he wouldn't tell me so. He'd have no ground to stand on if he did; no one ran off at the mouth like the Doctor.

"Ooh, a rebel."

"You have no idea. One time – " Jack checked abruptly. He'd forgotten he couldn't just tell stories anymore. He could talk to his team, and anymore they were the only people he was interested in talking to. "Well. It was a big deal."

"Hm." She looked over his shoulder, at the wall, at another café patron, he didn't know. He'd thought to keep his back away from the window or the door, but he hadn't looked at what was behind him, reckoning that if anyone tried anything they'd probably end up hypnotized on a roof anyway and he wasn't the type to go with them. Just when the conversation had gotten easy, work had gotten in the way again. They were back to stuttering attempts. "Confidentiality is a pain," the girl with the tea objected. "What _can _we talk about?"

"Sports. Politics. The weather," Jack listed. "Sex. The people around us."

She laughed at that, at the last two listed with almost as much boredom as the first three. "The people around us?"

"It's a game I play with my boyfriend," Jack explained. "Figure out what someone is doing here, as accurately as possibly – or as wildly. Points for getting it correct." He'd played with more than Ianto through the years – Estelle, Proust, John Hart. He'd beaten all of them senseless until he taught Ianto the game. "Like that woman over there. She's thirty…two, married, has two – no, three kids, the oldest of which just turned five. She left the kids with her husband after he came home from work…" Jack paused. "She told him she was going out with friends. She's exhausted, and looking for some way to recoup, and some part of her thinks it would be a fine idea to just walk away and have her own life again."

His companion stared. "How did you do that?"

"I learned a lot from my boyfriend." Jack said, refusing to commit.

"Are you always so depressing?"

"No – that's just who she is. She won't actually leave. She'll just think it was a good idea, and cry because she thought so. Look – her blouse is stained with baby burp and she's on her third slice of chocolate cake and hasn't slept in a while, to go by her eyes."

"But is that always what you see?"

Jack's eyes slid around the room, looking for a concrete argument. "The baker – I can't see her name tag. University student, works here part time, studies in between batches. Studies – physics." He was a little surprised by that, but she didn't have the stains of a chemist. "Statistics say she'll change her major three times this year. One of those will be food science. I don't know if she'll keep it, but she likes it here. She walks to work and knows most of the people who come in."

"Jasmine," Jack's girl said. "Her name is Jasmine. I'd say you have her pretty well."

Jack brushed the compliment aside. "I've had a lot of practice. Your turn."

"Him," the girl pointed. Jack turned to look; she had pointed just over his shoulder. "The one with his back to us, in the big grey coat."

The wall was mirrored. Jack chuckled. "It's cheating since we've met – but I'll let you get away with it since it's your first try."

"He's lonely. He's separated from everyone he knows and in a strange city, which scares him since he's used to being in control. But he's used to being on edge, too." That might have scared Jack, except she knew he was special ops. "He's friendly, but he likes having friends around to back him up on that. He's an action person, not much of a lecturer, and not a leader either – a pack dog, a soldier. He has contacts in odd places."

"Enough," Jack interrupted. "Where did _that _come from?"

She looked surprised. "Your coat. You have a RAF coat, but I don't think you fly."

"Not much of one for airplanes, no."

"You still want me to stop?"

Jack waved a hand. "Go ahead."

"Um… he's a pack creature without a pack, but he deals with that. He's so used to strange things he doesn't know they're strange. He's independent – he doesn't care what other people think if it means something to him. He has a boyfriend," she explained. "And he's been lying through his teeth to me."

Jack jerked. "Hey, I – "

"No, I get it. I'm special ops too. It's a right party of us, isn't it?"

"I'm sorry."

She waved this aside again. "You don't know how much I'll lie to you before the night is done."

He grimaced. "Maybe we should stick to the weather."

So they talked about the weather, and about camping (Jack had plenty of stories from before Ianto banned it), and about the worst possible scenarios for working in, steering carefully around specifics. They talked about people and places and transportation, and when Jack looked at his wrist strap to see if he should go, they talked about time, what it was and its relativity.

Jack liked her. If not for Ianto, and her boyfriend, and the time warp, and confidentiality, and that he had time traveled and fought aliens and died and could never tell her, he might have fallen in love with her. As it was, by the time he excused himself to go find his Doctor, he did not regret the time bomb.

"Hey – before you go – " The girl dug in her purse for a moment, came up with a card. "It's just my cover job, but I'll pick up. Call me some time; maybe out security levels will match."

Jack took the card and put it in his pocket without looking at it. "I'll do that. It'll be a while," he warned, thinking of the time warp.

"I'll wait. We can introduce our boyfriends, if you wait long enough."

"Yeah. Hey, sorry I don't – "

"No problem. You're not precisely the type for a cover story, are you?" She looked his costume up and down. They laughed. "See you, coat-boy."

"See you, tea-girl." He left.

~*~

The Doctor wasn't glad to see him, but there wasn't much Jack could do about that except Retcon his drink and know that the next time that Doctor met Jack, he'd get over it. It didn't change the outcome of the encounter anyway; the Doctor was honor-bound to undo the mischief his species' war had done to an innocent bystander, and Jack had proof it was a time bomb that had done it to him. He didn't tell the Doctor about the Retcon, in case Time Lords could consciously counteract it and mess up the space-time "continuum". Jack's Doctor would probably approve.

He couldn't resist, just before the Doctor left him standing on the Plass at the moment the bomb had gone off, giving this version just one little hint.

"Hey, Doctor!" He called. The TARDIS door didn't quite close; he was listening, if grudgingly. "Thank you." Jack said, and didn't add 'for everything' for continuity's sake. The laws of physics could use a break.

Then the TARDIS engines roared and Jack went down to the Hub to find a way to entertain himself until the team got back. He ended up pawing through Ianto's things looking for his diary, because anything in there written about him was fair game.

"I leave my private things at home, sir," Ianto said from the doorway. Jack looked up from a drawer and grunted.

"You're too organized."

"How long was it?" Ianto asked quietly.

"Only two years," Jack assured him, still rifling shamelessly. "And I got a lift from a friend, so it only took a few days."

"Good friend," Ianto observed. Jack laughed.

"Not for another two years. Or something like that. His time line's convoluted. Wibbly-wobbly."

"Is this a friend I need to worry about?" Jack wondered if Ianto was jealous. It was hard to tell sometimes.

"Not anymore. I chose." He pulled his hand out of the drawer, an upside-down photograph between his fingers. "What's this?"

Ianto crossed the floor and snatched it from him, shoved it deep into a pocket of his suit, but not before Jack caught a glimpse, a smile that was only just familiar to him. Tea-girl?

"Lisa," Ianto said shortly, and shifted weight, uncomfortable with the subject, uncomfortable with its ending. "Before. You would have liked her." His face shifted rapidly, worriedly, afraid this would be taken the wrong way. Jack pulled him close and learned to mourn again, and laugh again.

"You're right. I would have."


End file.
